A common problem for centrally managing a large number of computing devices in an enterprise network revolves around identifying and assigning an appropriate network management server to perform management tasks for each managed computing device in the enterprise. Such management tasks include, for example, delivery of policy (e.g., software provisioning instructions to obtain software package(s), software package installation scripts, configuration data, and/or the like, from one or more software distribution servers, etc.) to enterprise computing devices. Unfortunately, there is no automated technique to identify and assign network management servers to enterprise computing devices. Instead, network administrator(s) have to manually identify and assign network management server(s) to each computing device in the enterprise that is to be managed.
For instance, network administrators are typically required to physically access control panel user interface(s) presented by each computing device to be managed to assign a particular “site code” to the computing device. The term “site”, or “site code” refers to the local area network (LAN), or the LAN sub-network in an enterprise to which at least one network management server is associated, and which acts as a management point for at lease one computing device. Only after the computing device has been manually assigned a site code by an administrator, can the computing device be booted into the enterprise for management by a network management server associated with the pre-configured site code. The need to repetitively perform such manual identification and assignment operations can be substantially time consuming, labor intensive, error prone, and expensive. This is especially the case when an enterprise includes many computing devices (e.g., hundreds of thousands) that need to be managed and many network management servers (e.g., hundreds).